Getting the Balance Right & Translation Tools – tranfree 71

 Business, tranfree, translation business  1 Response »
Jun 292010
 

tranfree 71 – Avoiding & coping with Staleness.

You can also download this edition of tranfree 71 as a PDF

Editorial

As I sit and type, it’s a beautiful sunny day here – perfect for the second week of Wimbledon.

We’ve got two articles for you this time. The first is about getting the balance right between work and other aspects of life. This is an area I have been constantly challenged in – having spent time at both extremes and in the middle. In the article we explore ways of coping with and avoiding staleness and burnout.

The second article is by Jost Zetzsche on the theme of translation tools. Jost is well placed to write such an article, as he publishes his own newsletter “The Tool Kit” about software tools for translators.

I hope you enjoy and benefit from tranfree smile

Alex

Alex Eames
tranfree editor, Author –

How to Earn $80,000+ per Year as a Freelance Translator and
Selling Your Professional Services on the Web

Getting the Balance Right – Preventing & Coping With Staleness

By Alex Eames

Do you ever get stale1? Do you ever find, when you’ve been working on a large project for a long time, that you just get fed up or bored with it? Does that ever happen to you?

Deadlines Can Help, But They Can Also Push You Over the Edge

It’s almost impossible to get stale on a job that’s “for tomorrow” because you’re only working on it for one day and you’ve got no choice. You have to get the job finished by the deadline date or bye-bye client.

But when you’ve been working intensely on a project for a while – burning the candle at both ends for a sustained period of time – eventually you can find yourself getting “stale”. You sit down at your computer and it feels like you are two similar magnetic poles repelling each other. It’s as if your computer says “not you again?” and the feeling is mutual.

You think to yourself “I want my life back”. That’s when you’ve got to sit up and take notice. You’ve been overdoing it! You’ve become stale and you need some time off.

You really need to listen to that, and take some time off. If you’re a “deadline junkie” – going from one adrenaline rush to another, with a string of tight deadlines – one day you might find yourself stale. You sit at your computer and you think “I can’t go on”.

So how is it possible to get the balance right? To be really honest with you, I’m not quite sure. But let’s explore a few possible solutions together.

1. Schedule Slots For Leisure Time (and protect them vigorously but flexibly).

Translation work can be somewhat sporadic – unless you’re busy ALL the time. (That can be a good problem to have, but not always. You’re more likely to get pushed into burnout if you’re too busy for too long.) Is there a way that you can schedule in some leisure activities as “Immovable Objects”?

Any kind of social, hobby or leisure activity that gets you away from your computer will work. Can you do that? Will it work for you? Can you say…

“Right! Every Friday I’m going to take the morning
off and go and play tennis”
(or whatever it is that you like to do).

Of course, you need to reserve the right to be flexible about it. If you know a job is coming in on Friday, take the time out earlier in the week. Just don’t make a habit of skipping the “time out” altogether.

2. Negotiate Better Deadlines (a lot of them aren’t real anyway).

“Sorry I can’t fit that in as I am fully committed this morning.
How about Friday early afternoon?”

OK, so you’re “fully committed” going to the gym smile, but they don’t need to know that! Quite often, deadlines are somewhat arbitrary, and if you care to challenge them, there can be a degree of flexibility.

3. Learn to say No (and resist the call of Mammon).

If a proposed deadline doesn’t offer any flexibility and threatens to rob you of your sanity…

“Just say No”

I’ve deliberately chosen that phrase from Nancy Reagan’s campaign against drugs in the 1980s. You see, I think you can get addicted and trapped in a “continuous earning cycle”, which can lead you to ignore other needs – both yours and others’. That’s a dangerous place to be. Adrenaline addiction is real and there are several different types. It’s not just people who jump out of planes and do crazy things. See adrenalineaddicts.org for details.

4. Improve Your Productivity (but share the extra spare time with yourself).

Productivity enhancing methods and tools can be a great help. But instead of always using them to earn more and more money, use them to work less hours and fit in some refreshing non-business activities. I bet you never thought you would hear me say that!
eek

5. Increase Your Rates and Work Less (yes you can).

This one might ruffle a few feathers. razz Increase rates? Impossible! You must be mad!

A big hint here is that if you want to charge more, you’ll need some (more) direct clients.

6. Predict Your Working Time Realistically.

Everyone hates wasting time looking through a document to either count words or estimate how long it will take. It needn’t take a long time. A few minutes spent really looking at a sample of the text might stop you from grossly underestimating how long a job will take you. We’ve all done it! You work on a job that looked great for the first ten pages, but the next five were a complete nightmare, taking twice as long as the first ten. Having a proper look at the job in advance can save you having to pull an all-nighter and tiring yourself out.

7. Sub-contract work and start an agency. (That’s a joke by the way).

We’re after less stress here, not more. big grin

What To Do If You Do Get Stale

Despite the above preventative ideas, there is still a likelihood that staleness will appear at some point. There is a tendency to take all the work you can get because of uncertainty over the future.

When you’re stale, you may try to force yourself to carry on regardless. Or, you can accept that you are stale and say…

“I’m not going to get anything useful done sitting at my
computer today. I’m going to take the day off and do
something fun; something I want to do; something I enjoy;
something for somebody else.”

As long as it’s something that changes your focus, away from your work and earning money, it will be refreshing. (Preferably something not involving your computer.)

It’s hard to be prescriptive about this, so I won’t even try. What is refreshing to one person will be a burden to another. But “a change is as good as a rest”. It really can be. Just find something that suits and refreshes you.

One of the main advantages of being a freelance is the total freedom. But, as I said in tranfree 69, you have to use it wisely. You also have total freedom to mess yourself up physically and mentally, if you abuse that freedom by working 24/7.

When you’re busy, there can be a very strong temptation not to have an abundance mentality but to be locked into the “feast or famine” mentality…

“I’ve got this glut of jobs right now so I’m going to work
my tail off, get all of this lot done, and then have a rest.”

But, the thing is, that your rest doesn’t actually materialise unless you schedule it in and stick to it. You’ll keep saying YES or agreeing to artificial deadlines to get your next adrenaline rush.

Most religious faiths recognise the Sabbath principle, which means having one day in seven free from work. I believe the underlying “earthly” reason for that is that it’s simply not good for you to work all the time. Yes you can get away with it for a while, but it will catch up with you at some point – and you’ll pay for it later!

Even if you aren’t a workaholic, adrenaline junkie (and not everyone is) I expect you know someone who is. I hope you found this useful and thought-provoking.

Alex Eames is the founder of translatortips.com,
editor of tranfree and author of the eBooks…

How to Earn $80,000+ Per Year as a
Freelance Translator
and
Selling Your Professional Services on the Web

1 Stale: having lost freshness, vigour, quick intelligence, initiative, or the like, as from overstrain, boredom, or surfeit: He had grown stale on the job and needed a long vacation. (dictionary.com)

For the second article visit http://alexeames.com/blog/?p=533

How to Kill Your Translation Business

 Business, tranfree, translation business  6 Responses »
Mar 302010
 

tranfree issue 68 – 31 March 2010 Resurrection Edition

Fed up of staring at your screen?
Listen to tranfree 68

You can also download tranfree 68 as a PDF.

Editorial

Well hello again. It’s been a long time. I’ve called this the resurrection edition for two reasons.

Firstly, it’s been a while since tranfree was published regularly and now it’s time to end the silence and start publishing articles to help translators with their businesses again.

Secondly, it’s Easter time, so it seems an appropriate title.

The Famine’s Over

I have been quiet for a while for many reasons, some of which I may go into in my personal blog at some point. But the main reasons I stopped publishing tranfree was that I ran out of inspiration to write new material and I was unwilling to publish junk just for the sake of keeping the business going.

But the good news is that the “seven years of famine” is over and I have a fresh, more mature perspective.

I will probably be looking for a new list host as my current one doesn’t seem to let me publish in HTML very easily, which I now want to do. Plain text emails look very retro now. So please bear with me until I get that sorted out. I may well send short summaries or partial articles with links to the full text so you can see them properly formatted.

Enjoy and benefit from tranfree

Alex

Alex Eames
tranfree editor, Author –

How to Earn $80,000+ per Year as a Freelance Translator and
Selling Your Professional Services on the Web

 

 


How To Kill Your Translation Business.


There are a lot of ways to kill your translation business, but here are 18 of the best.


1) Charging low rates.


Charging low rates is a very quick way to kill your business right at the outset. You will end up trying to get too much work, tiring yourself out, working too hard for too little reward. You need to get it into your head that the only way to survive on low rates is to live in a poor country. If you don’t live in a poor country, you need to charge realistic rates.


2) Bidding low rates to get work on portals.


Why would you do that? Portals and bidding are OK right at the start of your career to build up some experience – if you need that. But why would you spend years chasing the dregs? Some people do. Oh well. They haven’t heard. Or if they have, they weren’t listening.


3) Going for the high-volume low rates model.


The only way to earn a lot if you charge low rates is to do an enormous volume of work. I don’t know about you, but I suspect the quality would suffer and you would get exhausted. It certainly doesn’t sound like the intelligent person’s choice does it?


4) Delivering poor quality product.


Obviously if your work is not fit for its intended purpose, when your clients find out, they will cross you off the list of suppliers. Getting good clients is hard, so try to deliver good quality that will meet their needs and keep them coming back to you for more.


5) Being rude to customers.


This is just plain stupid, but all too common. Give them a positive customer experience and they’ll be back. Only be rude if you are saying goodbye permanently. Even then, better not to because you never know who they will tell.


6) Delivering work after the deadline.


Just don’t do it, EVER! Unless there is an emergency, or a really credible reason. Missed deadlines can cause clients major hassles, lost business and all sorts of other problems.


7) Slagging off customers on public Internet forums.


Why would you do that? It doesn’t take much of a brain to realise that anything you type on a public forum could come back to bite you in the bum at some point in the future, does it? Assume your customer WILL find out what you said. Don’t expect to hear from them again.


8) Not having a proper credit control policy.


One of our clients, TTC Creative, went bust in 2008. We lost about £300. It’s a shame, but not a major hit. One translator on the published creditors list was owed £12,000 (~$19,000) OUCH. I would cry – literally. But how on earth was it allowed to happen? Would you extend £12,000 in credit to any client? Set a level you are happy with for each client and do not over extend it. Once the credit limit is hit, do not accept additional work from them until you have been paid for the previous work.


9) Not examining the work before accepting it.


You’re busy. A project manager (PM) on the phone wants you to take a job, and you just want to get on. You haven’t looked at it and you just say “yes” to get rid of them. OOOPS. You just accepted a real pig of a job. It will take you ten times longer than usual because it’s got some horrible terminology in it. It’s badly written and you’ll wish you’d never accepted it – and for a discounted rate too. Oh dear – we have got a lot to learn haven’t we?

10) Borrowing money to fund expansion.


This is the best way to go bankrupt. Borrow money, take on staff, fail to grow, bye bye business. Yes it can be done, but very few people have the business acumen to make it work. Don’t expand until you can afford to do it with real money that you have already earned.


11) Excessive Internet/Forum Usage.


Spending all day moaning about low rates instead of actively looking for new direct clients? Bleating about the latest 0.0000000000001 cent per word offer (even though it was posted by one of your “friends” to wind you up)? Try to limit your forum usage to specified periods of the day or you may find you waste the whole day chatting and getting wound up by other people with no work.


12) Accepting a large project from a new client without checking them out.


Unless you can negotiate staged payments, this is a sure-fire way to commit commercial suicide. Always check out new clients to make sure they are not known scammers. There’s enough info sharing sites out there, so there’s no excuse not to do it.


13) Not answering the phone, emails or other correspondence.


I read something on a forum the other day about not answering the phone while you’re working. Well, from the client’s point of view, if you don’t answer the phone, I will ring the next person on the list. Surely it’s not rocket-science? OK, if you’re busy working, you might not be able to take that job right now anyway, but how do you know? Can you afford to take that chance? No. If it’s a timewaster, just hang up. It could be an excellent opportunity though.


14) Poor security, breaching confidentiality.


Don’t ever post identifiable portions of a job on the internet without permission. Don’t submit your translation memory (TM) containing such jobs to a public web site (otherwise the SOAR project could become a SORE project). I’m not saying don’t submit (that’s your choice) just be VERY careful about what you submit.


15) Trying to steal your agency’s clients.


Don’t be naive enough to think you will get away with it. This is stealing. It’s unethical and you WILL most likely be caught. You will then get a bad name (don’t for a moment think that agencies don’t talk to each other about translators).


16) Working into a language in which you don’t have native level ability.


Just because you can understand a language and translate out of it, doesn’t mean you can write at an acceptably good level in it. I can always tell when English is written by a foreigner because the articles are horribly abused or simply not used at all. (The definite article THE, and the indefinite article A). If I tried to write sentences in Polish or French, the readers would be laughing their socks off before reaching the third line of text. Don’t do that to your clients. They might not be able to get the work checked until they get laughed out of a meeting.


17) Sub-contracting large jobs by splitting, without checking and unifying the quality of each submission.


Two sins in one. Firstly, splitting up a job is to be avoided if at all possible. If not possible, the whole lot needs to be Quality Assurance checked (QA) by one translator to make it consistent. Oh, and you did ask the client’s permission to sub-contract didn’t you? I thought not.


18) Taking the wrong advice.


There seems to be a large number of translators out there on the Internet, who think that the way to go is to continually keep dropping rates and chase the work all the way down to the bottom. This only works if you are in a low wage economy. If you live in a country where you can make a good wage and earn a decent living for 10% of what I need, there is never going to be a way that I can compete with you on price.


To all of you out there, who are worried about these people – STOP! There is nothing you can do about it, so spend your time on something more worthwhile. You will never get rich by chasing after the bottom end of the market. It’s simply not the way in the service sector.


Bidding for jobs might be a good way to get some experience when you are first starting. But it is not the right way to go if you want to build a successful, satisfying, high-earning business as a freelance translator.


It seems almost too obvious to state, but the secret to high earnings is high rates. There. I’ve said it now! There will always be people out there who are willing to pay decent prices to get decent service. How cheap is the translation which costs your company millions of dollars in lost business?


You need to educate clients. It takes time. It might not be easy. But it is certainly worth it. How is it possible that a company will spend thousands or millions creating their corporate communications and then let some fairly low-grade secretary “who knows a bit of the language” translate a very important document for them. It’s ignorance – pure and simple.


Educate those clients, win them, keep them. Build your own future. There is more than enough work out there for those who can do this. Are you one of them?

Alex Eames is the founder of translatortips.com,
editor of tranfree and author of the eBooks…

How to Earn $80,000+ Per Year as a Freelance Translator
and
Selling Your Professional Services on the Web

ISSN 1470-3866

 

***End of issue 68***

Social networking has come of age (even for freelance translators)

 tranfree, translation business  No Responses »
Mar 132010
 

Several social network sites for translators have sprung up recently. Clearly they meet a perceived need that the classical forum sites don’t. For busy professionals it can be difficult to meet all one’s social needs in person. These sorts of sites can be very useful and fun to snatch a little human(ish) contact in spare moments.

The main problem is that, for busy professionals it can be both good and bad. Good because it gives “human” contact, bad because it provides another reason to stay at the computer instead of getting up and moving about, giving our eyes a rest. It’s all too easy to get hooked in.

A new site http://www.langmates.com/ by the guys behind AIT software was launched on 3rd March 2010. By 12th March they had 1000 members.

It’s very similar to Facebook in look and feel and functionality. I think it’s a brilliant idea and wish them every success.

Another one I took an instant like to, and was made instantly very welcome at is Andrew Bell’s http://watercoolernetwork.com/, which is a network for established freelance translators only. Membership is not a “free for all” and all members need to be approved. It started a few months ago and there are now 827 members.

Even more selective is stridonium which applies three selection filters before you can be a member. You have to…

  1. be a member of a professional translators association or have a minimum of three years translation experience
  2. be nominated by two existing members
  3. pay an annual subscription of €50 plus VAT

This is going to be a fairly exclusive private club, and that’s obviously the intention. I am not a member so can’t evaluate it. But here is what they say on the site…

The aim of Stridonium is to provide a platform for professional translators to interact in a collegial spirit of give and take. As the site was not set up for commercial purposes, there is no formal area on the site for outsourcing work and no attempts are made to sell products or services to members. Furthermore, as befits a community of adult professionals, regulations are kept to a bare minimum.

If you are a professional translator and are interested in joining the Stridonium community, please see the conditions for membership.

So that’s three for now, but there’s probably more I don’t yet know about.

How do you Interpret This?

 tranfree, translation business  No Responses »
Mar 102010
 

Listen to: How Do You Interpret This?

I have just received a very interesting offer from a German interpreting company. It came through the post and addressed to my translation agency, in a brown A4 envelope, with a fairly thick, bulky brochure attached.

On first quick scanning of the letter, it looked quite impressive and the letter did its job. I picked up the brochure – quite a thick presentation and thick paper – good quality printing all about conference interpreting.

The brochure was nicely presented, good use of photographs – plenty of “white space” – nice brochure. I flicked through the first half, which was in German. I thought to myself “hey this is very good – I’ll just flick forwards through to the next part where they’ll have the English version”. So I flicked through the rest of the document, all looking very nice, but the whole thing was in German.

I don’t get it. The letter was English, sent to an English address. They clearly knew it was to an English firm, but the brochure is in German. I know that it says translations in the company name, but that doesn’t actually mean that I’m going to pay somebody to read your marketing literature. I don’t speak German, some agency owners will, but most won’t.

So I decided to go back and have another look at the letter. Now before I rip into the letter, let me say again, the letter did its job. It got me to open the brochure and have a look. That is what the letter is for. But on closer inspection, the letter is seriously wanting as well.

It starts with the foreigners classic, “Ladies and Gentlemen”. That is not how to start a letter – that is how to begin a speech. Well, this is written by a conference interpreting firm, so we can only assume that their skill set lies in the spoken realm. Yes, sadly on close inspection, the letter is very foreign sounding “this is not an image brochure”. Can anyone tell me what an image brochure is? Sorry but I’ve never heard of one. I bet if you are a German-English translator you will know the German word this was translated from – I don’t.

Next we have “This is an updated, highly informative handout about conference interpreting.” Well I think I can figure out what what they’re trying to say, but it’s very stilted.

They even go on to talk about having interpreted for Barak Obama and Tony Blair. Clearly these people are top-flight interpreters.

I could go on. In fact, I’d quite like to go on. But I won’t. Why won’t I? Simply because I’m not trying to embarrass or belittle people. I am simply trying to make the point that when you spend time and money marketing yourself, you would be very wise to ensure that you have good quality marketing materials to do it with.

It would probably have been mortifying for them to admit this, but what they actually needed was a translator. Not only that, but it needed to be someone with native English.

Perhaps it was a mistake? Perhaps all the other agencies in the UK that they sent their materials to received a copy of the brochure in English? Why do I doubt that?

I don’t know. Let’s call it a gut-feel thing. How undignified would it be for somebody who has interpreted for president Obama to have to pay a translator – a mere translator – to prepare marketing materials for them. Dignified or not, it was clearly necessary in this case.

This is a very clear example of a top flight professional thinking that a translation can be done satisfactorily by a non native. Even worse, it’s a language professional. Tut, tut – should know better! This is somewhat disheartening for the profession. How can we expect captains of industry, businessmen, governments, and others to respect, value and take our profession seriously, if our fellow language professionals don’t? I guess they thought they could do it OK? But isn’t that something we hear nearly every day when we’re asked to proofread and correct poorly written documents that were translated by the “secretary who knows a bit of English”.

Okay. I don’t mind a letter from a foreigner who sounds a bit like a foreigner. That is to be expected. That is forgivable. But what I find unforgivable, in terms of marketing errors, is the sending of a 24 page brochure in German trying to solicit work from a UK firm. The only reason I didn’t throw it in the bin immediately was because I thought it would make an interesting article on how not to market yourself.

Alex Eames
http://www.translatortips.com/
helping translators do better business